“The Clown Watches the Clown” by Sara S. Messenger is a masterfully written story about a masochistic janitor of a cybermotel who is desperate to recapture a feeling he had in a past relationship—a relationship in which he was used and then abandoned, but also one in which he got a taste of something real. It’s a story about exploitative systems, different levels of complicity in those systems, and about how sometimes honoring who we truly are can set us free.
Sara S. Messenger is calling on you, dear reader, to join her in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people. Wherever you are, throw what sand you can in the gears of genocide. Sara resides in the USA that is funding and manufacturing the bombs dropping on Gaza. A speculative fiction writer and poet, her work can be found in Fantasy Magazine; The Year’s Best Fantasy, Vol. 2; Diabolical Plots; and Strange Horizons; and her website is sarasmessenger.com. The elimination of the Palestinian people is not inevitable. With every breath we must resist, resist, resist.
Marissa van Uden: Thank you for joining to talk about this incredible story, Sara! I’ve never read something quite like it—it’s doing so much in such a short space, and I enjoyed every moment and layer. On your website, you describe “The Clown Watches the Clown” as the “heart of my heart, crown of my stories.” Why is this story so close to your heart? What makes it so personal to you?
Sara S. Messenger: Oh, what a difficult question! This answer will span several reasons.
The first reason this story is close to my heart is I began writing it after reading and watching the very queer Fight Club, and reading the dizzying novel X by Davey Davis; those works changed my internal aesthetic taste and thematic landscape, as art you really like does. I think this story has great beginnings, in a way.
Secondly, I really resonate with the emotional affects in this story. I’m really fond of and interested in certain emotions, and this story dials them to an eleven. It marinates in guilt and desire and shame, repression and physical pain, and using escapism to cope with the unjust wounds you inflict, and the unjust wounds living inflicts on you. I feel like this story is about coming-of-age in some ways, queerly and politically.
I think I’m drawn to themes about reconciling your childhood as you’re meeting the world, or growing up and into the world, because I feel I’m still doing so in many ways in my early twenties. Moreover, this story’s composition is inseparable from my orientations and movements as (among other things) East and West Asian, and diaspora in America, and disabled. I’m also proud of this story on a technical level—I enjoy writing unexpected juxtapositions, and I feel the juxtapositions in this story, of cyberpunk/masochist/clowns, form one of my most ambitious so far.
And lastly, this story is very personal to me because it wouldn’t have come about without my thesis, which I dubbed cyberclownery. I spent a year exploring art and research, and writing a collection of creative work, on orientalism, cyberpunk and clowns, and objecthood. As my culminating effort, I ultimately theorized how clowns in cyberpunk can function as a figuration of the yellow woman.
MVU: Oh wow, that sounds like such a fascinating thesis. Thank you for this new rabbit hole of ideas to explore. Can you tell us a bit about the writing process on “The Clown Watches the Clown”, how you took it from the seed of an idea to complete story?
SSM: Yes! I nailed down the conceit over the course of a week in January 2023 and then worked on it on and off—sending it to others for feedback, revising—until October 2023, when I submitted it to Apex. I had toxic best friends on my mind (Fight Club!) when I wrote the first line on a whim (“I dress up as a clown …”). I thought, here’s something.
That initial week in January, I approached the story from several different angles. I was having particular trouble with who would be the clowns in the story, because that largely impacted the conflict and themes. At one point I decided to sit down with my copy of Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses and journal about it. Then I emerged with my story’s elements more or less settled!
Over the course of the next eight months, and in the lead-up to publication, over a dozen people in my writing-professional and personal life were kind enough to read over my story and give feedback, and I revised after each round. I am deeply grateful to them for their time and energy; without their feedback, this story wouldn’t be half as smooth, or clear, or robust, as it is now!
MVU: I love when the title is also the key to unlocking the story. In this case, there is a definite “Ah!” moment at the end: that last line plus the title together tell us something about who the character really is and what different future is open to him. Did the title come to you early on or only after it was written?
SSM: The title came right after I stumbled into the last line of the story! While writing the ending, I knew the last line was very close without knowing which sentence it would be, and I so badly wanted this story to stick the landing. (I pressure myself with writing endings! I think of it as: I want to find an ending that is not merely thematically suitable, but one that “sticks the landing,” in the way of competitive gymnasts. That specific inertia, the concluding somatics!!)
I’m really glad you enjoyed the link between the last line and the title, and the possibilities they offer together!
MVU: The character often makes direct comparisons between two things that are literally the same: his relief is a relief, he is in pain from the pain of it, his best friend was the best. Was that an intentional choice, and what does it reflect about him throughout this story?
SSM: It actually was not! My best friend pointed out the pattern to me when they read a draft early on. It definitely started out as a voice thing that I began to invoke repeatedly. Interestingly, when I wrote each instance, I did feel, and do still feel, that the unnamed narrator is actually making meaning from juxtaposing two different things.
In hindsight I really like the outwardly recursive nature, for many reasons, but at the very least because it feeds into the recursion of the ending, and the title!
MVU: I thought the details revealed about all of the characters and the society they live in were perfectly timed—always leaving just enough out of reach to keep us full of questions, but also giving just enough so that the thread was easy to follow as the full picture took shape. Did it take a lot of careful revising to get the timing of those details just right, or is this one of those stories that naturally unfolded on the page into its final form?
SSM: It definitely took a lot of careful revising, with the help of many others! While the central conceit solidified in the first week of drafting, I was asking about and receiving feedback on the details of the story until the very end, especially when it came to the societal dynamics. It felt like the details were forming a relay race, where the baton they were passing off to each other was the reader’s understanding. I had to keep adjusting the racers.
MVU: I love that analogy! And I really feel that in the story—it’s one that rewards a second read to see how you draw us through and how precisely the society and backstory comes into view. So beautifully done! Can you tell us, what other pieces of literature or other media is this piece in conversation with or influenced by?
SSM: Beyond the aforementioned, a lot! All writers are swimming in shared cultural spheres, and though there wasn’t a specific work beyond the aforementioned percolating in my head as I wrote, I think this story owes a good deal to transfeminine speculative traditions of cyberness and punkness. I am a guest in these halls. I’ve enjoyed work by Paris Green/Frog K, Torrey Peters, and other talented writers in the past, and more recently I’ve enjoyed work by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, as well as the essay of speculative synthesis and history “Bodies of Mass Destruction: Gender, Personhood, and Violence in Trans Speculative Fiction” by Weronika Mamuna in Strange Horizons.
I want to use this answer to also highlight some works that have been on my radar. I’ve heard great things about Mika’s No Tiger, published by Apocalypse Party. On my to-read list for history and theory are Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton, and the recently released A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson. (The podcast she’s a member of, Death Panel, did a great episode on refusing genocide with guest Rasha Abdulhadi, a queer Palestinian writer, editor, and cultural organizer.) I’m also excited for the transfeminine cyberpunk fiction anthology coming out this year from Neon Hemlock, called Embodied Exegesis, edited by Ann LeBlanc!
There are some academic sources I was greatly informed by while completing my thesis on cyberclownery. If someone were to read them, I think it would deepen certain connections they might see within the story.
Orientalism by Palestinian scholar Edward Said, a fundamental read in literary, postcolonial, Middle Eastern, and wider Asian studies;
Anne Anlin Cheng’s article “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” as well as the introduction to her longer book of theory Ornamentalism, which deals with the racialization and orientalization of yellow women as object;
Margaret Rhee’s “In Search of My Robot: Race, Technology, and the Asian American Body,” which introduced me to the concept of the human/animal/machine racialization trichotomy;
Timothy Yu’s “Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer,” which does an excellent job digging into how orientalism, xenophobia, and anti-Japanese fear manifest in classic cyberpunk landscapes;
(I specify classic cyberpunk because of the existence of the feminist post-cyberpunk movement, which Kathryn Allan has written about in the collection Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, and which camp I feel “The Clown Watches the Clown” falls into);
and Marcelo Beré’s “Misfitness: The Hermeneutics of Failure and the Poetics of the Clown - Heidegger and Clowns,” for if someone wanted to know why clowns, laden with failure as they are, function in this story with disruptive, revolutionary intent.
Lastly, I feel like the following works of theory are relevant to my story because of the dynamics present between the queerness, racialization, and dis/ability of the characters:
Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times excavates how queer acceptance in nationalist and supremacist contexts does not equal queer liberation, as well as how the inclusion of some queer subjects into the ‘productivity’ of the state depends on demarcating Orientalized terrorist bodies;
and Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability is a deep disruption of neoliberal frameworks of disability, unearthing how states use disability, debility, and capacity to control populations and make certain populations more available for injury than others.
My aviator Doraemon plushie, who guards my bookshelf. He’s joined by tiny stuffed koala triplets from a zoo gift shop in Japan. Currently they’re all sitting on some Japanese children’s books, as well as the kanji and grammar studying I should be doing.
MVU: This is such an incredible list, and I really have to thank you for listing all these for our readers, because I know my ears perked up when you mentioned your thesis. This is a genuine treasure trove of amazing-sounding resources. OK, now a fantasy question: Let’s say you just walked into a cybermotel, you’re in a good mood, and you can afford one session in a simulation pod (with a bit left over to tip the janitor). What memory would you love to access?
SSM: Oh, great question. It would depend! Recently I remembered that when I was in early elementary school, I’d take drawings of mine that I especially liked and tape them to my bedroom walls. Some of those drawings I really did love. I don’t know where they went, and though I have inklings, I no longer remember what the drawings looked like. I’d love to gaze upon them one more time.
MVU: That is such a beautiful answer—I love this idea so much. I read your dreamy, mythical, and truly transportive story “Potemora in the Triad,” which was published in Fantasy Magazine in 2022 and has since been reprinted in a best-of anthology and at PodCastle, and nominated for the Nebula Awards Suggested Reading List. It’s a gorgeous piece, rich with emotion, imagination, and that strong love of siblings. What different writing techniques were you using in this one, especially in comparison to “The Clown Watches the Clown”?
SSM: Wow, thank you so much for reading! I just sat down to compare and contrast the two stories, and to my surprise it was much easier to find traits and techniques they hold in common than what differs between.
Both stories concern main characters with relatively little agency compared to others in the story (in the case of Potemora, daughter of the world-serpent, she has barely any agency at all). They’re both in first person, both use braided form to alternate between the past and present, and both make use of a repeating phrase. They both shift point-of-view at the beginning of the narrator’s climactic moment of distress, and both reveal withheld truth at the very end.
They do, however, contain some significant differences in technique, the biggest one being tone and mood, which is built in tandem with style and voice—terms I don’t often examine my stories by. Potemora is young and earnest, her style ornate and somehow formal, mood more restrained and therefore outwardly level, whereas the unnamed narrator’s style is casual and crass, their mood more dynamic, voice candid, and tone jaded and shocking, frequently obscuring and undercutting herself with her sardonic attitude. They’re also quite a bit more humorous.
“The Clown Watches the Clown” is also more invested in direct explanation than “Potemora in the Triad.” With Potemora, one of my goals for technique was to write not only an emotionally indirect narrator but an extremely indirect story overall, to try and give nothing away directly and only nudge and weave and imply.
And although they both use braided form, Potemora is told in fragments, whereas Clown makes use of longer scenes. Clown also makes use of epistolary form where Potemora, and my previous stories, do not. And lastly, they’re in different genres, though this was one of the last things to occur to me.
MVU: Love these insights—it makes me want to read both stories again and consider all of these more deeply. In addition to short stories and poetry, you’ve also written some interactive fiction. I played the delightfully unsettling “Mothman Test” and saw that it was originally a “forever trunked” flash story (and it was also nominated for the Nebula Awards Suggested Reading List!). For us moth and moon lovers, can you tell us about the inspiration behind this piece?
SSM: Yes! So, the pitch for the game is: “This is a multiple-choice test about mothmen. You do not believe in mothmen. And your brother is not dead. If you feel lost, look at the moon, as moths do.”
This game was originally a flash story that was originally a short story. The short story, though I don’t remember exactly what led to its writing, was during a period of time in early 2022 when I was starting a lot of short stories to try and make one stick … and mothmen are one of my favorite cryptids.
I never quite got the short to a place I was satisfied with. I also adapted it into a flash fiction piece in the form of a multiple-choice test, experimentally, to see if that might fly. It unfortunately didn’t (as in, it needed revision, and I didn’t want to revise.)
I unearthed the flash when musing on what I should write and submit to the 2023 EctoComp interactive fiction competition—I have an interest in narrative design for video games, and I thought it might be a good learning experience to enter one.
MVU: I thought it worked really well. Perfect for that format! What did you learn from translating a flash story into an interactive game? Any surprising challenges or fun revelations?
SSM: I was surprised by how naturally the flash settled into the interactive fiction form, after wrestling with versions of the story for ages! It makes sense—any story in the form of a test is inherently interactive. It felt like it gained a new rhythm once I began to translate it into Twine, and then the story became very easy to revise. Feeling it in interactive form suddenly made its pain points clear to me.
Beyond that, I really enjoyed the basics of the form: the greater degree of finesse you have over the player’s received experience, the ability to be greatly intentional with the text’s actual presentation (like visual poetry!), and being able to move beyond traditional linear text—for example, adding unlockable scenes-within-scenes, or fill-in-the-blanks, or music. Working with and thinking in terms of IF’s added dimensions of responsivity is really fun. I look forward to releasing more interactive fiction games! I have a few on the backburner.
MVU: Oh, that’s great to hear! I will keep an eye out for these. I saw that you’re also a slush reader for two different venues, PodCastleandkhōréō magazine. What do you enjoy about reading slush, and how has it affected your own writing?
SSM: I think when you read slush, you become exposed to a diversity of stories in topic, voice, form, technique, and perspective. You not only stretch your own taste, but can, and should, take it a step further and contextualize your own reactions as you read each piece: Why do I feel this way? What reflexive or subconscious assumptions am I making? What exactly isn’t working in this piece? What does ‘working’ even mean or look like?
I’m uncertain as of yet how slush reading has affected my own writing. I think it’s made me a better critique partner to my friends and a better reviser of my own stories. But when it comes time to submit to a venue, I’m still primarily concerned with what everyone else is at the end of the day: will the first reader bump my work up? [laughs] [she writes, in a typed interview]
MVU: Hey, you got me laughing too. :) Thank you so much for joining us and sharing more about your writing! Can you tell our readers what you’re working on next, and do you have any upcoming projects or publications they should keep an eye out for?
SSM: Thank you so much for this thoughtful interview!
I have a flash fiction story forthcoming in Nightmare Magazine quite soon, about an automaton boy who gestates barbed wire. My work has waltzed with horror affects for a long time, so it’s a joy to debut my first “horror story” in Nightmare. I’m also a writer on an unannounced interactive fiction project, and I’ve been greatly enjoying working on that.
I may find a place to publish my thesis in the future, or self-release it, since it is SFF synthesis and criticism, but nothing is locked in place yet. (If anyone is interested in taking a look, do let me know!) And lastly, I’m also working on a novel, but the less said of that, the better.
